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• rude
• arrogant
• snobbish
  

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This is new for me, so has anybody here gone through the process of obtaining a degree higher than a master's?

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ORIGINAL: MissAsylum

This is new for me, so has anybody here gone through the process of obtaining a degree higher than a master's?

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ORIGINAL: MissAsylum
This is new for me, so has anybody here gone through the process of obtaining a degree higher than a master's?

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ORIGINAL: samboct

Hi MissA

There are actually a few of us hanging around here with Ph.Ds. I'll let the others chime in as they see fit. My doctoral work was in bioinorganic chemistry and I've actually got a somewhat different viewpoint than some of the previous posters. My experience was that Ph.Ds were in demand when I started school, but by the time I came out after a post doc 9 years later- research was getting cut in lots of industries (did I mention I despise Ronnie Rayguns?) and most of my friends and I wound up being in a terrible scramble for jobs. People with Ph.Ds in history have fared worse since schools have been replacing tenured faculty with adjuncts at much lower pay (and it was never great to begin with)- it can be very hard to make a living as an academic. Teaching at a high school is considered a good job for a history Ph.D.

Schools have also done an abysmal job in terms of speaking out about the poor prospects of employment for their Ph.D. students. People assume that since Ph.Ds are hard to get (and they are- I've met relatively few bozos who've slogged it through) that people with the degrees are in demand- but it's not true. Schools have a vested interest in making sure that there are Ph.Ds around campus- they do a lot of the work for dirt cheap. Also- in times of economic hardship, a lot of folks decide to hang in school- I did. The problem is that when you get out may not be any better than when you went in. Be very, very careful about taking loans out to get a degree. Some schools will offer financial support for their graduate students in areas outside of the sciences- shop around.

Ph.Ds can also make you LESS marketable. People assume that if you've gotten a Ph.D in a field and you don't get a job in it- there's something wrong with you. Trying to change fields can be a nightmare because of this assumption. So if you come out with a Ph.D. and you want to be a museum curator and discover that there are no jobs, you'll be needing a big shovel. Really- how much turnover is there in this field? I'll bet that there are a handful of jobs a year at best. So while the Ph.D. can fuel a sense of personal accomplishment- it's often a millstone when it comes to employment.

Something to kick around...

Sam

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ORIGINAL: Tantriqu

As a Domme, poetically, yes, yes, I DO have a degree higher than a master's ;-)

If your PhD is in the arts and in a highly desirable or politically correct field, get ready for the gravy train of professorship with working two-day weeks plus four-month long summers off, tenure, and retirement at 50!
If your PhD is in the arts and NOT employable, hmmm, do you want fries with that? You have to choose between the reality of doing what you love and the uncertain future of being paid a living wage to do what you love, i.e., being a TA without employment benefits for decades.

If it's in the sciences/engineering/math, get ready for hard work and an endless glamourless thankless job that's gotta be done. And then a post-doc. But at least you'll be contributing to the collective intelligence of humanity in a meaningful way, unlike those lazy bastards who got the identical degree as yours but without labs, experiments, writing or studying, just by parsing Bon Jovi lyrics or smearing their earwax on canvas and lighting it on fire as performance art.

And an mba is nothing but a degree money can buy, where most businessmen pay their secretaries to do their homework.

There ya go!

Good luck!

Edited to add:
A friend's partner got his degree in library science: 8 years for a master's, for chrissake! He's a lazyass to the rest of us, but that's an aside: he wants to be a curator, and apparently lots of museums need archival folks NOW, so he's taking the path of applying now, rather than run the risk of going into a PhD programme and watching the job offers dry up. But that's just him. ymmv

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ORIGINAL: MissAsylum

well according to your profile, you are only 25, further education is well within your reach if you want it.

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ORIGINAL: MissAsylum
this really took me a while to process. you gave me a lot to think about. thank you.